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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Events: Monday Salon

Ali Alizadeh

When: Monday the 4th of March, 2013; 7:30pmWhere: Evening Star, corner of Cecil and York Streets, South Melbourne, Victoria, AustraliaCost: Free Entry
Port Phillip Gilgamesh Readings invites you to their Salon on Monday. Ali Alizadeh will be reading from his upcoming novel transactions,
and Matt Hetherington will be discussing “Haiku.”
The MC for the evening is Steve Smart.
Drinks and tapas are available at fair prices, and there is
an open mic section.

The inaugural Australia Nature Writing Prize was awarded in 2011
to Annamaria Weldon for her piece 'Threshold Country'.
The winner of this $5,000 biennial prize will be announced on
Wednesday 13th March in Melbourne.

Short listed for this year's award are:

Liam Davison

Lindsay Simpson

Margaret Barbalet

Stephen Wright

Tamsin Kerr

The competition's judges Geordie Williamson—literary critic
with The Australian—and Dr Janine Burke, distinguished biographer,
art historian and author of The Nest, found the standard of entries
so extraordinarily high that determining the short list was
a significant challenge.

Congratulations to our shortlisted applicants and to everyone who
submitted an essay. Stay tuned for the winner next month! Click here to learn more about the prize and our work in Australia.

Uneven Floor is a poetry magazine in blog form. It plans to publish five or six poems by a featured poet roughly once a month and two or three individual poems each week. Its mission is to get more readers for new poems and poets from Western Australia and beyond. Read poems and more information at unevenfloorpoetry.blogspot.com.The first featured poet is Neil J Pattinson, with four regular poems (as Neil interprets 'regular'), two haar-cooo and one front-of-the-envelope graphic.You know you want to. While you're there, check out poems from WA poets Allan Padgett, Kia Groom, Maureen Sexton and Terry Farrell, and UK poet Anthony Costello.

NominateUneven Floor does not accept unsolicited submissions. Instead readers are invited to nominate poets whose work they'd like to see in Uneven Floor.

Spread the word

Please spread the word! Forward this message. If you have a website or blog, link Uneven Floor and let us know so we can return the favour. Share, like, tweet and recommend Uneven Floor and the poems in it, and leave comments on the poems. This helps make the magazine more visible online.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

BY Parul Guliani

Poet Simon Armitage is planning to walk the 260-mile path along England’s coast this summer, bartering his words for hospitality. He will offer readings in local pubs, schools and village halls in return for food and shelter.
Armitage was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2012 and has won numerous other awards including the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry.

"The whole idea is that of the barter. All I've got to offer is my work, and the reading of it," he said to the Guardian. "Will that be enough for people to say I can stay at their home, or that they'll give me some sandwiches? I'm looking for anyone who can tolerate me . . .”
Armitage, who walked the Pennine Way in 2010, will depart from Minehead, a coastal town in Somerset, on Aug. 29 and plans to arrive in Land’s End, Apeninsula of southwest England on the coast of Cornwall, on Sept. 17.
According to the Guardian, Armitage's Pennine walk inspired the book “Walking Home,” and he is planning to write a follow-up, "Walking Away," about his journey through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.
"The first book turned out to be about people and their stories, and that's what I'm hoping to find this time," he said.
Armitage hopes locals will join him on his walk, though he acknowledges the importance of “Wordsworthian moments of tranquility.”
Armitage isn't the first to come up with such a conceit. Other famous walking books include Robert Macfarlane’s "The Old Ways" and Rory Stewart’s "The Places in Between."
"Armitage’s account is so observant, so funny and so intensely likeable you leave it wishing he’d picked a longer route," the Telegraph wrote of "Walking Home."
Let's see if he's able to accomplish the same feat for a second time.

Poetry is made in a bed like love. It's rumpled sheets are the dawn of things. Poetry is made in the woods. It has the space it needs.Not this one but the other one whose form is lent it by.The eye of the kite. The dew on a horsetail. The memory of a bottle frosted over on a silver tray. A tail rod of tourmaline on the sea. And the road of the mental adventure. That climbs abruptly. One halt and it's overgrown. That isn't to be shouted on the rooftops. It's improper to leave the door open. Or to summon witnesses. The shoals of fish the hedges of titmice. The rails at the entrance of the great station. The reflections of both riverbanks. The crevices in the bread. The bubbles in the stream. The days of the calendar. The Saint-John's wort. The act of love and the act of poetry. Are incompatible. With reading the paper out loud. The meaning of the sunbeam. The blue light between the hatchet blows. The bat's thread shaped like a a heart or a hoopnet. The beaver tails beating in time. The diligence of the flesh. The casting of candy from the old stairs. The avalanche. The room of marvels. No good Sirs it isn't the eighth Tribunal Chamber. Nor the vapours of the roomful some Sunday evening. The figures danced transparent above the pools.The outline of the wall of a woman's body at daggerthrow. The bright spirals of smoke. The curls of your hair. The curve of the Philippine sponge. The swaying of the coral snake. The ivy entrance in the ruins. It has all the time ahead . The embrace of poetry like that of the flesh. As long as it lasts. Shuts out any glimpse of the misery of the world***Thanks to Peter Cicariello for this.

We're Hiring!Are you creative, energetic, and raring to be a key part of a busy festival team? MWF is looking for a Marketing Assistant. This is a fantastic opportunity for anyone interested in developing their marketing skills in a festival environment. Please visit mwf.com.au for full details. Applications close on 15 March.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Dreams of being a "scoop journalist" inspired Ian Wedde to follow a writing career.
It "didn't work, of course", he says, although he did do a stint writing reviews for a London magazine.
Blenheim-born Wedde is the 2011-13 National Library New Zealand Poet Laureate. Marlborough literary fans can hear some of his work on Friday when he gives a reading at the Millennium Art Gallery.
He will be joined by three other poets: Chris Fell, Dinah Hawken and John Newton. Wedde says a feature of his time as Poet Laureate has been to give others a chance to air their works in public.
Face-to-face contact with people who might read his own poems, novels and essays has been a personal highlight while poet laureate, too, he says on the phone from Auckland.
"It's actually been a challenge, to hop out of myself a bit, [because] writing can often be a very introverted, lone activity. And of course it always will be; you have to write the good sentence and you do it by yourself, not at a committee table."
Invitations to attend public events, visit schools and give readings like the one on Friday evening have freed him from his "lonely writing desk", he says.
There have also been scripts to submit and deadlines to meet, all common work for the man who has earned National Book Awards for both his fiction and poetry, has held writing fellowships at Otago, Victoria and Auckland universities; was the 2005 Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton, France, and was made an ONZM in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours for his writing.
One project as Poet Laureate was to compose a poem for the 140th commemoration of New Zealand's worst maritime disaster, the HMS Orpheus. It sank, killing 189 of the 250 people on board, on February 7, 1863, at Whatipu, after hitting the Manukau Harbour bar.
Organisers of a commemoration held this year asked Wedde to write a poem for the event. Going to Whatipu with his son Carlos and grandson Sebo for a "happy beach-day", Wedde thought about the shipwreck and decided to write a poem that offered a remembrance of the sailors who lost their lives, a hope for Sebo's safety; and also a homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876).
A verse in Wedde's poem, titled The Wreck of the Orpheus, reads:

and in the gale-battered cliff above, look! - a rock-faced giant guarding the wreck, eyes and mouth wind-hollowed for birds to nest in, a pastoral forehead . . . but there was no shelter for Orpheus

Wedde says poems by William Carlos Williams taught him that "very small, ordinary things in the world in one's life can be as important as huge events, if not more so".
Poets need to look at the detail, be "affectionate towards the detail", he says.
The theme of Friday's reading, "Writing Home", was penned to reflect Blenheim as the first place Wedde called "home". It was the town where he was born and spent the first seven years of his life, but he is unsure of its influences. What happened next was more impressionable.
Wedde's parents had taken their young family to East Pakistan, later known as Bangladesh, and Wedde grew up learning that "home" was less about being connected to a place and more to do with the love and bonds formed between family members and close friends.

Hong Kong targets top four finish at Twenty20 with sights on World Cup qualifier

Hong Kong coach Charlie Burke. Photo: May Tse

Hong Kong aim to finish in the top four at the Asian Cricket Council Twenty20 Cup in Nepal next month to remain in contention for a berth at the 2015 World Cup qualifying competition later this year.

Jamie Atkinson will lead a 14-strong squad for the 10-team Asian qualifiers in Kathmandu from March 26 to April 3 where two teams will join Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates at the world qualifiers in Dubai in November.

"Presuming that UAE [who as hosts gain automatic entry] and Afghanistan [included because they are a one-day international side] top their group, our target will be to make it through to the semi-finals to qualify for Dubai," said Hong Kong coach Charlie Burke.

"We are in a separate preliminary round group to UAE and Afghanistan and as such an easier one. We need to finish in the top two of our group to ensure we will be in with a chance of qualifying for the World Cup."

Hong Kong are drawn with Nepal, Malaysia, Maldives and Singapore. Nepal are likely to provide the stiffest competition in the group stage.

All-rounder Munir Dar is the only big name missing from the squad after he made himself unavailable for selection. If successful, the squad will be strengthened by November with the availability of Mark Chapman and Haseeb Amjad.

"Mark is still undergoing rehabilitation from knee surgery and we didn't want to risk him for this tournament, while Haseeb only becomes eligible under the four-year rule this summer. They will both strengthen the side and it is important that we qualify for Dubai so that we can use them," Burke said.

Atkinson, who led the side last season, will have Waqas Barkat as his deputy.

Monday, February 25, 2013

One night, my wife and I dreamed the same dream: we had carried our mattress to the ocean, thrown it into the water and climbed on. We lay together in that bed as we drifted out into the deep water, in a night that was teeming with stars and silence. We slept deeply in the lulling motion of the waves, and we dreamed we were sitting in a cafe by a ski lift in the sun, drinking coffee and watching people slide down the mountain. The language we were speaking is not one we speak, but we understood each other perfectly well. By then our mattress had drifted out of sight, and fish had started circling — but we were still sleeping, dreaming that we’d decided to ride the ski lift to the top of the mountain, despite the fact that we had no skis, that our clothes were barely warm enough for the outdoor cafe.

UNQUOTE

Michael Hettich's two most recent books of poetry are LIKE HAPPINESS (Anhinga Press, 2010) and THE ANIMALS BEYOND US (New Rivers Press, 2011). His newest chapbook, THE MEASURED BREATHING, won the 2011 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest. He lives in Miami with his wife, Colleen, and teaches at Miami Dade College.

As well as the major prizes, every finalist in the Head On
Portrait Prize and the inaugural Head Off Landscape Prize
will receive a $500 Nik Software package, winner of
numerous awards. All finalists in the Photobook Awards
will receive a prize from Momento.

Due to demand, we’ve extended the competition deadline to 17 March so make sure you get your entries in.

Head On is all about excellence in photography, regardless
of the celebrity of the photographer or their subject. We are
looking for fantastic submissions from everyone. If you know
someone who’s taken a great image or created a stunning
photobook, please share this email with them and encourage
them to enter!

This is a themed fiction competition, open to all ages and genders. Rachel Funari, the namesake of the competition, was the founding editor of Lip. Tragically, Rachel went missing in 2011, while on holiday in Tasmania. We are launching the prize in her honour, because she was determined to better the lives and opportunities for young women.

As Lip is a feminist magazine, the theme of our competition is ‘Herstory’, a play on the word ‘history’ and with a focus on women’s stories. And ANYONE CAN ENTER!
All entries must be:

original pieces of writing.

previously unpublished, unperformed, and not entered into any other competition.

up to 2000 words.

We’re looking for creative, insightful fiction that addresses the theme in any kind of way. Our competition will be judged by Lip chief editors and a panel of esteemed judges:Clementine Ford (feminist speaker, writer and radio broadcaster)Karen Pickering (host of Cherchez La Femme and organiser of SlutWalk Melbourne)Kat Muscat (Editor of Voiceworks)Sophie Cunningham (writer, editor and Chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council)Zoe Dattner (Creative Director of Sleepers Publishing and General Manager of SPUNC)

We will reveal prizes within the next month, but for now we can promise you they include libraries of Australian contemporary literature, opportunities to work with members of the publishing community and monetary rewards!

Entries are now open, and they close midnight on Thursday 28th February. The winners will be announced at an event in April. Winning entries will be published in a special print edition of our magazine and online at our website.

Kattertonia

The Wit and Wisdom of Bob Katter

You've seen him wearing Top Gun sunnies, bringing a billy to boil, leaning on a bunch of bananas and addressing the 'Don't Meddle with Marriage' rally.

But what's going on under that hat?

In these pages we lift the brim and uncover the words of a true-blue Aussie who shoots from the hip.
Bob Katter doesn't hold back when it comes to himself: 'There is a rage in my soul, a hatred in my soul.'

Far-north Queensland: 'It is a magic land and we could support … a population of 80 million people in the Gulf Country alone.'

Women: 'He said that I considered women second-class citizens. If they were staying at home and not working then I would not consider them second-class; I would consider them first-class citizens.'

Environmental activists: '… not a race of people that I like in any way, shape or form.'

The information age: 'I have long since given up reading journals and newspapers and watching the television, because the flow of information is so erroneous and misleading.'

Gay rights: 'If homosexuality is a fashion statement, it is a very dangerous fashion statement …'

The live cattle trade industry: 'They're people that love their animals, sort of.'

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Scottish poet William McGonagall has been dubbed the world's worst by critics who accuse him of using inappropriate rhythms. Photograph: Mary Evans Library/Alamy

One of the unpublished works of a music hall performer from Dundee who gained infamy as the world's worst poet is expected to fetch thousands of pounds at auction.

Edinburgh-born William Topaz McGonagall, a 19th-century weaver and actor who wrote about 200 poems, is widely regarded as the worst poet in English literature.

Although he delighted and appalled audiences, who sometimes threw rotten fish at him, his books remain in print and he is still widely quoted long after his more talented contemporaries have been forgotten.

He composed Lines, In Praise of The Royal Marriage on 6th June 1893 to celebrate the union of George Albert, Duke of York, the future King George V, and Princess Victoria Mary of Teck.

The handwritten, previously unpublished manuscript belongs to Roy Davids, a collector who is selling his entire hoard of poetry. It is expected to fetch £3,000 at Bonham's in London in May.

Critics have accused McGonagall, best known for penning The Tay Bridge Disaster, of being deaf to poetic metaphor and employing inappropriate rhythms that resulted in unintentionally amusing poetry.

In Praise of the Royal Marriage

God bless, the lovely, and sweet Princess May, Also, the Duke of York, so handsome and gay.
Long life, and happiness to them, in married life.
May they always, be prosperous and free from strife.
May their hearts, always be full of glee. And, be kind, to each other, and ne'er disagree.
And, may the demon, discontent, never mar their happiness.
And, my God, be their comforter, in time of distress...
And, if they have children, may they grow grace.
And, be an honour, to the royal race. Of the empress of India, and Great Britain's Queen. Who is faithful to her subjects, and ever has been.

The winning entry will be published as a book with Fence Post Press in August. The author will receive 25 copies and a royalty contract for all sales other than those from author stock. The hard copy of the book will be placed with online distributors and made available print-on-demand.

Hello friends
Sitting here patiently in the studio while the acoustic guitar parts are recorded over and over!!!! is a good opportunity for me to remind all Perth peeps that Dave Brewer, Ric Eastman, Roy Martinez and myself will be playing TheEllington this coming Friday 22nd 8pm. We love this venue. There's always a wonderful connection between the band and audience. We're also road testing some new tunes YIPPEE!!! About bloody time!
Tables are sold out but still standing/dancing room available.

As Southerly's Guest Blogger, KATE HOLDEN has a very interesting post up right now. Here's how it starts -

Kate HoldenI just heard Richard Ford tell Margaret Throsby on ABC-FM that, in writing, what writers do is make themselves smarter than they really are. He likened the creative process to a crucible, one which was hot and focused, and which made him seem smarter than he is. And this fits in perfectly with what I was thinking last night: that writing is very much about vanity, and embarrassment.It’s always astonishing to me how little we talk, in essays, interviews, in teaching students, about the psychology and emotions of writing. Those things are what brim in us every time we sit to write. Fear, often. Glee. Pride. Astonishment and assurance. Fear again; stronger: terror. And often at the heart of all these and the other fugitive things we feel are the questions: how dare I think I can do this? And, why would I think I can’t?

Here's a little poem by me, first appeared at The Wonder Book of Poetry - Ants and Us
Andrew Burke

Today againin this new towna million or two tiny antskeep formation going abouttheir business followingtheir instincts and i likenthem again to us asi have since i was knee-highto a grasshopper we toofollow our instincts to eatto reproduce to followour leaders with our two feethandicapped as we areby human intelligencebeclouding our instincts withunsettling clouds of thought.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Announcing the 2013 Frost Medalist, Robert Bly

02/12/13 by PSA

The Poetry Society of America is honored to announce that Robert Bly is the 2013 recipient of the organization's highest award, the Frost Medal, presented annually for "distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry." Previous winners of this award include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Lucille Clifton, Charles Simic, and Marilyn Nelson who was the 2012 recipient.

It seems clear that what you all want to know is, “How do I get published in Ploughshares?” So, lets start at the beginning. Literally.

If you want to get out of the slush pile, one of the worst things you can do is write a lackluster first paragraph. Don’t make the mistake of thinking: the really fine writing starts on page three of my story, and I’m sure they’ll appreciate it when they get there. By page three, I’m frustrated. If you want out of the slush pile, you must prove it from the first paragraph, from the first line.

We’ve reached the final installment of our series on Ferdinand de Saussure and the scintillating study of semiology. In our last post we left our friend Saussure in a rather unflattering light, when we explored the first scientific evidence against his hypothesis: that the relationship between the sign (a word) and the signified (the concept a word represents) might not be as arbitrary as Saussure posited.
Saussure believed that there was no natural dogness in the word “dog” or treeness in the word “tree,” and that the words could be any string of letters as long as every speaker of a given language agrees upon and accepts that they have the same meaning. This theory went widely unopposed for the latter half of the twentieth century, but in 2001 neuroscientists Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard developed a study that uncovered a cognitive link between physical shapes and the sounds speakers associate with them.

In their “Bouba/Kiki Experiment,” test subjects were shown two shapes: one spiky and one with rounded edges. They were then asked which shape was “Kiki” and which was “Bouba.” 95-98% of participants named the spiky shape “Kiki” and the rounded shape “Bouba.”

So wait a minute. If there is some organic connection between a concept and the word for it than Saussure was wrong, our language isn’t arbitrary!

Hold your horses, skeptics. Saussure’s got something to say—

In A Course on General Linguistics (a piece transcribed from Saussure’s lectures by his former students that formed the backbone of semiology and linguistic structuralism), the linguist introduces the idea of signification versus value.

Signification is essentially the work of the sign, the unit that combines concept and sound-image (word). But the key feature of a single signification like “B-I-R-D” representing creature with wings is that the sign is self-contained and means “creature with wings” independently of other signs. The introduction of the term value creates a necessary paradox within linguistic theory because the mental conjuring of signs and their subsequent use in speech and writing is deeply dependent on their place in the greater system of language. Let’s unpack that a bit. What is a bird? A creature with wings. But a “bird” is not an “insect” despite the fact that many insects have wings. So for us to gain a fuller understanding of “bird” we must also understand the meaning of “insect” so that we know what a bird is not.

According to Saussure, values can also be exchanged for new concepts the way monetary values are exchanged. There was a time in the early- to mid-twentieth century when “bird” was a slang term for “women.”

The same concept of differentiation applies to the written/spoken value of a sign, because its clear communication is dependent on that sign not being confused with any other sign. If a mispronunciation allows “bird” to slip into “heard,” then the sentence will become incomprehensible. Similarly in written language each letter of a word must distinguish itself from every other letter of the alphabet for the word to be readable.

Alright, signification = self-contained; value = interdependent. We get it. So what does any of this have to do with Kiki and Bouba?

Saussure would point out the fact that Kiki and Bouba have an extremely limited value and that value is reliant on the directly oppositional nature of both shapes (i.e., there are only two, and their forms conflict). What if the value was increased and there were 50 shapes and participants were asked to choose from a bank of 50 names? Would they choose the same or similar names for the shapes in question? What if value were removed entirely and only one shape was pictured and participants were asked to make up a name for it? Would they draw a plosive “K” for the spiky shape out of thin air?

It’s difficult to say. Attempting to remove value might be an impossible dream. We have been trained by our culture and our language to make certain associations, and when we look at a page with a shape on it, we bring a lifetime of cultural conditioning with us.

These would be Saussure’s doubts through the lens of A Course on General Linguistics, and they’re not without merit. But even in the face of so much linguistic skepticism this data is still groundbreaking. It doesn’t have to threaten the arbitrary origins of established words, but it can help us direct the development of new words in more intuitive directions.

And if you can believe it, Saussure makes room for shifts of this kind in his theory. He thought that there were two ways to study language, forming a sort of axis of thought: synchrony, a snapshot of a language frozen in time, and diachrony, the study of language in flux. The “Bouba/Kiki Experiment” is nothing if not a diachronic moment for language.

Ferdinand de Saussure was a rebel. He came out of a nineteenth-century scientific tradition that sought to study language taxonomically the way a botanist might catalogue plants or an ornithologist, flies. But Saussure saw that language was an enormous picture, and that there was no attempting to describe or quantify one aspect of it without also conceptualizing the vastness of the whole. Knowing that to understand the whole would be impossible, he looked to language’s origin in the mind with the non-verbal “concept,” and then applied this idea to the individual unit of the “sign,” a constant within all languages.

Throughout out his entire life, Saussure’s conception of language grew and grew as elements of universality entered into his system of signs. Why should it not grow beyond his death?

Founded by Singapore-based poet Cyril Wong, SOFTBLOW has been a home
for contemporary poetry from all over the world since Sep. 2004. From Nov. 2009,
we have had a new selection and editorial team comprising of Eric Low, Gwee Li
Sui and Jason Wee. We also have a page on Facebook for announcements about future
updates.

T.S. Eliot once stated that "it must be the small and obscure
papers and reviews, those which are hardly read by anyone but their own
contributors, that will keep critical thought alive and encourage authors of
individual talent." More than just another literary site featuring excellent
work by such talents, SOFTBLOW also hopes to better focus the eye back on
the poem. This journal does not pretend to exist for a general reading audience.
It is for unswerving lovers of poetry who also appreciate how far poetry has
come over time.

SOFTBLOW is ad free. We do not get paid for doing
this. Poets will not be remunerated for having their works featured here. This
journal is updated at the start of every month. All poets featured in the past
are placed in our Archive.

Prose
that defies categorising falls under poetry in our book and is more than welcome
here at SOFTBLOW. To submit, simply paste 4-6 works with a short
biography in the body of an email and send it to editor @ softblow.org. Copyrights
revert to the authors upon publication. All work published is with their
expressed consent.

The images for this site are courtesy of Sarah Quek,
who is currently furthering her studies in art and does illustrations on the
side.

We swiped each other’s side mirrors off and scored the bodywork.Nobody’s fault, blind corner, hedgerows, mud and snow. We both slowedslipped, slid, stopped, got out and had a laugh on the ridge in the centre of the road.Jesus, this is middle earth, he said. You from round here?No. I told him. Australia.No kidding! Long way from home.And you?Middle America, man. Well, North Minnesota.Oh I said. Pretty cold, eh? Dylan left a girl way up there.Yeah? Dylan Thomas? I didn’t know...I’ve just driven up from Wales...No no! Never mind.Okay. Wanna swap mirrors for fun? Mine’s fucked. Hertz’ll love it!Right. Might as well. Don’t know about Avis.Hey Aussie, you go first. My side’s muddier than yours.We shook hands and I drove three miles to a lay-by,climbed a stile into a field and sang softly to a black-faced ewewho just stared at her image in the American’s mirror.If you’re ever up on that mountain over there,remember me to a girl so fair...See? I said. You’re beautiful. I propped it on a fence postso she could keep admiring herself after I’d gone.Baaa- bye! I called as I drove away but she didn’t look up.Who said sheep were stupid?

THE PHANTASMATIC ISSUE: Can we say we live with our selves and others spectrally? What are we communing with? Are the dead more alive than ourselves? Are we the dream of language? Where and how do we experience our experiences? This is a call for poems of the phantasmatic; poems about the phantasm, the actually virtual, the virtually actual, spectres and spectrality, the liminal world, public and private, that makes up the really real.

Send between 3 and 5 poems to: rabbit poetry@hotmail.com, along with full contact details, 50-word bio, and a response to the following question: who is your favourite dead poet?

"Awesome night last night at Coral Carter's Kalgoorlie launch of her first poetry book, Descended From Thieves!

Well done, Coral! About 30 people attended and enjoyed the first public readings from members of the Goldfields Writers Group as well as Coral's beautifully written poems.

Check out Mulla Mulla Press's facebook page [or HERE ]for more info about the book, which sells for only $20.

Be prepared to be shocked, and to laugh and cry, sometimes all in the same poem!"

outlookmainly patheticwith brief periods of hyperventilation in the morning the risk of a severe panic attackprobable piss weak by late afternoon moderate self criticism increasing to hatred in the early evening followed by flagellation throughout the rest of the weekthe weekend forecast mostly maudlin with patches of self pityextended forecast grimhttp://www.mullamullapress.com/descended-from-thieves-coral-carter